The Moise A. Khayrallah Center for the Study for the Lebanese Diaspora Studies started as a pilot project in North Carolina in 2010 as the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese American Studies.
The biggest change with the Khayrallah project has been the shift in concentration from addressing the diaspora in North Carolina to the United States as a whole.
The center is collecting national census data as well as historic data about the Lebanese immigrant communities to construct social and economic profiles, said Akram Khater, the director of the Khayrallah Center and a professor of history at NC State.
The project began as a response to the narrative that had emerged after Sept. 11 about Arab Americans, including Lebanese Americans, which was one of terrorism and violence, Khater said.
It started as an oral history project where researchers collected the stories of immigrants whose ancestors came to the U.S. in 1880, as well as immigrants who had just arrived to North Carolina to preserve their stories so they could be shared with the public. The oral narratives were turning into the documentary Cedar in the Pines that aired on CBS in 2012 and a museum exhibit currently touring the state of North Carolina, Khater said.
Marjorie Merod, an NC State graduate in public history and the archivist for the Khayrallah Center, said she has been involved with the Khayrallah program since its inception. She served as assistant director of the Khayrallah program, headed the North Carolina death certification collection and was the co-curator of the Cedar in the Pines museum exhibit.
The center will be a hundred times more productive than the project had been, pursuing academic scholarship and public outreach for the Lebanese community across the country like the program did in North Carolina, Merod said.
Khater said the mission of the Khayrallah Center is to produce and disseminate public historical projects relating to the Lebanese diaspora as well as advance new scholarship on the historical and contemporary Lebanese diaspora globally in all of its dimensions: social, political, economic and cultural.
The center will include sponsoring a Triennial conference on Lebanese diaspora, funding for short workshop visits for affiliated scholars from across the world, an online digital research archive for the history of the Lebanese diaspora in the US, the journal Mashriq & Mahjar, which is dedicated to Middle East diaspora studies, and public history students concentrating on Lebanese diaspora studies, according to the NC State Lebanese Studies website.
The center will also be translating the information into documentaries, museum exhibits, art exhibits and digital interactive technologies such as games and apps that allow for the information and knowledge that the center gathers to be disseminated to the general public, according to Khater.
By creating and analyzing the data, the center will be engaging the topic of immigration by providing information so that debates around the world can become more fact-based rather than based in emotion, Khater said.
“The immigration debate is highly emotional, and we don’t really have a lot of information about what immigration does,” Khater said.
The center will be studying why some immigrant groups succeed where others fail and why some immigrants maintain a distance from the mainstream culture while others immediately embrace it. The center is taking what it learns from the study of the Lebanese diaspora to allow them to have conversations about other immigrant populations, Khater said.
The scholarly part of the mission will include hiring undergraduate, graduate, masters and Ph.D. students within the department of public history, as well as outside the department. The staffing for the center will primarily be from NC State students, and there will be a postdoctoral fellow from outside NC State that will come to work at the center on an annual rotating basis. The center plans to add more faculty members that are specifically tied to the center, but the majority of the staff will be undergraduate and graduate, Khater said.
Another project the center will be undertaking is the construction of a new documentary telling the story of Lebanese immigrants from 1860 to the present throughout the whole United States in a three year project. They are also planning a national museum exhibit that will tour the United States five years from now, Khater said.
The projects will be conducted by students in paid and unpaid internships, and the center will be working with the students to help them publish their work in journals and present at conferences, Khater said.
The center has a space allocated in Withers that they will be occupying somewhere between the end of spring and the middle of summer, Khater said.
“I don’t think you could find many people in this country today that don’t have some sort of immigration story in their history,” Khater said.
